Jobs I Should Have

 I am currently, as they say, "between jobs", and have been giving some serious and some not at all serious thought to work that I am particularly well suited to do. These are my not at all serious thoughts, in that no one would hire me to do these jobs, and some of these jobs don't technically exist, but I believe they should and that I might be the best person to do them. 

1. Editor for the Harry Potter book series

JK Rowling is an amazing story teller. The language she uses is inventive, the worlds she creates are truly magical and immersive, and she does an exceptional job developing her characters as they mature from middle school through young adulthood. 

JK Rowling is not the best writer. I gave up on reading the books about midway through Goblet of Fire because OMG she just blabbers on and on. She indulges in 50 page tangents and background about characters that go nowhere and don't enhance the story line. Her sentence structures at times are chaotic. Much like Stephen King, she tends to fall back on tropes throughout the series, some of her own creation and some that are exhaustingly stereotypical, particularly in the doofus persona of Ron and the brilliant bookworm Hermione. 

The excessiveness needs editing down, the sentence structures could be tightened up in areas, and some material needs to either be pushed into other standalone books or simply dropped. If you've ever read an interview of Jodie Foster, they can be mind numbing because the woman seems to never shut up. She is wildly successful, her career is productive and challenging, and yet she's so enchanted by her own persona that its off putting. In some limited aspects JK's writing strikes me that way. It's a weird sort of narcissism not to temper your own thoughts, writings or production, as if restraint were only for the less accomplished. 

My most significant gripe with the storytelling itself - not the job of an editor, but I'm going to mention it anyway - is that she repeatedly kills off characters either to seemingly manufacture drama or because she doesn't know what to do with them and wants to focus on new ones. And then she introduces new ones and kills them off too. The stories are fabulous and they follow wonderful arcs. But take a lesson from Tolkien and keep most of the good guys alive. Don't ask your readers to invest deeply in a multitude of characters that you gradually exterminate to presumably reinforce your main characters isolation. That's a bit cheap. 

2. Editor for the Harry Potter movies

Ok now I'm really mad. A badass female author who turned over her incredible stories to all male directors (and screenwriters, I believe), one of whom had never even read the books, and it SHOWED. Mike Newell, Goblet of Fire, by far the worst, most discombobulated movie of the series. He has been eviscerated in other reviews but he deserves it. What kind of arrogant jackalope even wants to direct a movie based on a book that he doesn't find interesting enough to read?  

The movies severely edit down the books, which of course they have to, and most of them do it exceptionally well. I would honestly love to see a Netflix series of the books that can be more expansive and include more storylines, like a Stranger Things style treatment. What bothers me is that Hermione is frequently made a nagging shrew in several of the movies, which to my limited knowledge she very much was not in the books. Include Women Directors, you freaking sexist jerks. 

Best movie of the series and arguably best book of the series: Prisoner of Azkaban. 

Best scene added by writers and director David Yates: where Harry and Hermione dance in the tent to 'O Childern' by Nick Cave, in Deathly Hallows part 1. Everyone seems to love that scene, it captures the deep friendship and intimate connection between Harry and Hermione, and it lifts the story out of the relentlessly, interminably bleak sequence (that I've heard lasts for 300 pages) in the book where nothing much happens. Ok, sorry, moving on. 

3. Dog chiropractor and masseuse 

This is my next career. Not kidding. I love dogs. I'm not a great dog trainer, though I plan on learning how to be a decent one. But helping dogs feel better, move better, relieve stress and pressure on their joints and muscles is definitely something I want to become outstanding at. 

4. Residential architecture and interior design critic

This is one of my favorite hobbies. Just ask my siblings, to whom I email house listings from Zillow, the Wall Street Journal real estate section, or links to various architecture or design sites along with many paragraphs of commentary that bores them silly. 

The reason I could never pursue architecture or design as an occupation is that I have laughably poor depth perception, seek out adult versions of garanimals because I can't match colors, put together complimentary patterns or styles, and although I'm trying, I have near zero ability to pull together a fashionable outfit much less a subtle, balanced, coordinated interior space. 

However, I've learned that TONS of people - including some builders and interior designers - are equally inept at these skills and have jobs doing them anyway, and I enjoy making fun of them. "Well Mary Beth, that's not very nice." Really? You're here so I assume we've met. 

The woman who writes the McMansion Hell blog is one of my personal heroes. She is an architecture expert and in addition to being hilarious, you learn things from her analysis about why some houses look like unbalanced battleships and others have the timeless grace of Biltmore House. 

Hat tip: the most atrocious houses in the Wall Street Journal real estate section are built by small business owners or builders who "have a passion for architecture" and the interiors were designed by (typically) their wives. Invariably it took the couple 7 years to build, they spent $7 to $20 million on the house, its a jumbled mess that often incorporates every overwrought design trend of the past 15 years, and they've lived there for 3 to 5 years and are now selling because "the kids are grown and our business increasingly takes us to Europe for several months of the year, so we're looking for a pied a terre in Paris." I would write the articles but I worry I couldn't sufficiently dampen a slight undertone of sarcasm. 

Those are some of the jobs I should have, while I continue looking for a job that I need, and am actually good at. Was this a TED talk? I honestly have never listened to one.